A Rahnerian Surprise

Karl Rahner, S.J. (1904–1984), one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, is a favorite whipping boy for many traditionally minded Catholics. Yet Rahner was something of a split personality. Part of him was the pious Swabian who, shortly after Vatican II, sat on stage at Notre Dame telling his rosary beads while another scholar read his lecture in English for him—and who, at the same event, told a youngster asking how he might become a great theologian to “memorize Denzinger” (the seven-hundred-page compendium of Church doctrine). The other half of Rahner was the student of existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, the theological lodestar of a generation of Catholic thinkers who took the “spirit of Vatican II” in the direction of Catholic Lite, and the precursor, in some respects, of contemporary Germany’s “Synodal Path.”